Cisco expands ThousandEyes’ capabilities with Code BGP acquisition

Cisco has announced the acquisition of Greek border gateway protocol (BGP) monitoring specialist Code BGP in a move designed to expand the capabilities of its ThousandEyes brand.

The networking giant says Code BGP’s team of experts will enable ThousandEyes to broaden its BGP monitoring capabilities, as well as its global, authoritative view of internet health. 

The company’s monitoring solution also brings real-time detection of BGP hijacking, route leaks, and resource public key infrastructure (RPKI) issues.

“The addition of Code BGP to the ThousandEyes team will enrich our already accomplished pool of Internet research and engineering talent, enabling us to increase our BGP monitoring capabilities and pace of innovation so we can accelerate our customers’ troubleshooting and optimization efforts in delivering the best possible digital experiences to users,” said Joe Vaccaro, vice president of product at Cisco ThousandEyes.

BGP is an exterior gateway protocol that enables the exchange of routing information between autonomous systems (AS) across the internet. 

It’s an essential technology that determines the best route to send data between these systems based on factors such as paths, network policies, or a network administrator’s rule sets.

However, its complex nature means detecting and troubleshooting incidents can be difficult. This year alone, according to Cisco's figures, more than 6,000 incidents of BGP hijacks, route leaks, and other issues were found to have occurred across the web. Cisco said its latest acquisition will help overcome these hurdles.

ThousandEyes’ visualization and alerting already enables organizations to quickly tackle issues that impact the availability and security of traffic as it makes its way across the web, with BGP visibility also making up part of the company’s publicly available internet reporting and incident analyses.

Now, Cisco says the addition of the Code BGP’s team will bolster its own capabilities through its extensive expertise and applied research experience in internet routing and measurement. 

That experience includes the company’s founders having research published in many of the world’s foremost conferences and journals, as well as being among the creators of the ARTEMIS open source software for real-time BGP prefix hijacking detection and mitigation.

“We look forward to welcoming the Code BGP team and, together, strengthening end-to-end assurance for digital experiences over the Internet,” Vaccaro added.

Cisco’s Code BGP acquisition is the latest in a string of buys for the company as it moves to expand its end-to-end network assurance and visibility capabilities.  

Back in June, it announced the acquisition of networking performance monitoring specialist Accedian in a move to designed to boost its automated assurance offering.

The networking behemoth then snapped up London-based broadband network monitoring firm SamKnows to expand ThousandEye’s view of global internet health capabilities and take its end-to-end network assurance to more broadband service providers.

Financial terms of the Code BGP acquisition were not disclosed.